I disagree with it being a premature optimisation. Treating everything that you haven’t already identified personally as a problem as a premature optimisation i

I disagree with it being a premature optimisation. Treating everything that you haven’t already identified personally as a problem as a premature optimisation is cargo cutting in its own way. The attitude of not caring is why npm and various tools are so slow. That said, I think NPM’s response was totally correct - explain the problem and the tradeoffs. And OP decided the tradeoffs weren’t worth it, which is totally fair.